- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Maybe not that interesting for everyone here, but I found no better community for this.
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And of course, the video was preempted by an AI slop ad of a talking monkey wearing a neck brace.
Use Firefox + uBlock Origin on desktop and on mobile. Only watch YouTube via Firefox. Never see these bullshit ads again.
Currently adblocking is winning the war of the technical evolution of control vs. resistance.
Shoutout to Revanced patcher if you’d like an app equivalent with the same level of customization
And VacuumTube for an app like experience on HTPC’s, linux based set top boxes, as well as MacOS and windows or linux based tablets.
Edit: added hyperlink to projects github page.
Sounds better than the fucking singing purple llama I get all the time ruining a song from Dirty Dancing by changing the ‘I’ to ‘AI’.
‘AI had the time of my life’ doesn’t even make sense!
It is literally AI taking time out of of your life, I don’t see how that doesn’t make sense to you.
Their quality going down is probably what’s killing their channel. Every video is a merch ad, and the occasional shilling for the fossil fuel industry probably doesn’t help any.
These things are to be expected when you get bought by private equity, but let’s not be dishonest and say it’s all AI slop that’s killing them.
When did they shill for fossil fuel? Not saying it didn’t happen, just wondering
Idk about fossil fuels specifically but they been directly being sponsored by big companies and in return making propoganda for them for a few years now.
As much as i regret linking to reddit here, i feel it is fair to also post the channels answer to the video.
I watch that channel for years and i had no idea. I post his answer over the channels answer. Although that is 3 years old, i wonder what is now happening.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thehatedone/comments/10pb1q9/my_response_to_kurzgesagt/
They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
In return, there were quite a few videos that Kurzgesagt admits were funded directly by the Foundation, that exaggerate the positive influence corporations owned by the foundation have had. Videos which the CEO of Kurzgesagt has admitted they probably would not have made if the Foundation had not paid for them.
That’s really embarrassing that we as a community have chosen, of all possible creators, to deride Kurzgesagt for taking money from The Gates Foundation. It’s 0.05% of their holdings. ZERO POINT ZERO FIVE. Which, by the way, is down from 6% in the past after public concern — yes, a whopping 6%. Scourge of the earth, locked out of heaven: The Gates Foundation. Those computer nerds strike again. And we choose to punish a great content contributor for that. Shameful display of purity politics.
Yeah. It seems like a ridiculous accusation to make. Bro couldn’t even answer the question about example of shilling so they had to pivot into the crime of taking money from a foundation to produce high quality educational content.
How dare they?
They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
In return, there were quite a few videos that Kurzgesagt admits were funded directly by the Foundation, that exaggerate the positive influence corporations owned by the foundation have had. Videos which the CEO of Kurzgesagt has admitted they probably would not have made if the Foundation had not paid for them.
question answered. if you don’t want to accept the CEO of Kurzgesagt word that they would not have made the videos if they hadn’t been paid to, then that isn’t my problem. I’m not here to convince you, and I don’t mind if you don’t believe him.
I did a few searches and while I didn’t find that quote from Kurzgesagt’s CEO, I did find the contribution listed from a decade ago on the Gates foundation website. $570,000 paid out over four years. They also gave NPR $2,000,000 the next year.
Since I didn’t find the CEOs quote you’ve mentioned, I can only question the context around it. Would those videos not have been made because the Gates foundation specifically tied the funding to those videos being created? Or would they not have been made because Kurzgesagt didn’t have the money to do so otherwise?
Regardless, Kurzgesagt is a private company and if they wanted to conceal hidden agendas by corporate contributors, they would just keep quiet - not openly acknowledge that they made content with money given to them by some larger organisation.
If we’re going to denounce any group of people that are connected via Bacon’s Law to a disastrous corporate industry, the moral high ground will be unachievable for the entirety of our species.
The Hated One did a video some years ago on the matter, if you’re curious then search it up because they list all their sources for everything including the quote from the CEO.
Still waiting on that citation. (not of your own prior post)
I said what I said to voice my own opinion on their channel, I didn’t voice it as an indication that I was interested in debating the matter. I’ve already come to my own conclusions. read their website and their medium, or search up one of the deep dive videos on it if you’re really interested. I’m not going to go too far out of my way to convince anyone, since it doesn’t really harm me in any way if you believe me or not.
I also didn’t say anywhere that you should stop watching their videos. you should, however, know who owns and funds every bit of media you consume, so that you can use that information to be healthily skeptical of things people are telling you, just as you are with me. I still watch fern., even though they are owned by PE, because their videos are high quality and mostly free of bias. but I keep in the back of my mind that they have corporate overlords that might want me to believe one thing or another.
I just think we need to be criticizing more important things than this. Kurz is not the organization we should be spending our outrage on.
I never told anyone to be outraged by it. You just got outraged because I criticized a channel you presumably like. I’ve literally said several times in this thread alone that I watch channels owned by PE.
the CEO of Kurzgesagt word that they would not have made the videos if they hadn’t been paid to
This on its own proves nothing bad. Some videos just require a bigger budget to make and can’t be made on their otherwise limited budget. Or the topic is just lower priority due to writer interests. If they were forced into covering specific topics then that’s a different story, but I haven’t seen any evidence that was the case.
The problem is when the contributors influence what the videos say, in contradiction to data.
Kurzgesagt’s video on +2° / +3° / +4° over the global mean isn’t going to be so bad video was conspicuous to me, and is in fact, based on fossil-fuel industry rhetoric, rather than climatology estimations (which tell us over +1.5° is going to fuck us, and is).
That’s a pretty dishonest take from that video honestly.
Feel free to explain it in better terms. TBH, I watched the first half and quit in disgust.
“I’m going to watch half the movie then complain about it not making sense and having a bad ending”
I’m trying to think of their ‘fossil fuel shilling’ video and only videos that come to mind are where they say we’re too entrenched in the fossil fuel industry to make a switch to renewable overnight. It’s just not realistic.
And other than fuel, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of products made from petroleum. Approximately 85% of petroleum is made into fuel. Rest is used to make things like pharma products, paint, pesticides, polymers etc.
even people who needs to use petrolatum(aka protroleum) comes from it, for thier dry skin, plus it used in many topical medications. topical ointment medication is more potent than the cream forms.
It’s not we, just notorious loser, cryptagion.
It’s important to have a coalition of support and so I won’t single anyone out, hence I used the word “we”. I have to assume others share their opinion about Kurz. But the larger point is that this is classic left infighting and, ironically, it stalls actual progress. Before we can be good at something, we have to be bad at something.
lol still salty, I see. that’s OK, boo-boo, I still love you.
Okay tankie
for context, our buddy null here got banned from c/leftymemes because he just kept spamming “ok tankie” to everyone. what he doesn’t know is that I’m banned from .ML and Hexbear, and run an anti-tankie comm, so him saying this to me is very amusing and I’m thinking of adopting him.
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$11 billion
0.05%
“A small loan of a million dollars.”
Does any of that matter in this situation, anyway? Exaggerating their content in exchange for money already places question on their reliability as an educational content creator.
I don’t think you understood what they’re saying. Try reading it again.
Hint: the investment of $11 billion refers to investment of Gates Foundation in fossil fuels.
Hint: the investment of $11 billion refers to investment of Gates Foundation in fossil fuels.
Well, considering these exact words were used:
That foundation owns over $11 billion in investments in the fossil fuel industry, including coal-burning utility companies.
What can I say but duh. If I misunderstood anything, it was the comment I replied to, which was unclear about the “0.05% down from 6%” detail, and seemed to be associating that with the $11 billion figure by context.
But hey, nice deflection, and super cool of you to be that rude about it, too.
per Kurzgesagt,
For Kurzgesagt sponsorships are an important part of our yearly budget, representing about 20% of our income last year.
the 0.05% figure is wrong, according to the people making the money themselves.
Have you considered that there are other sponsorships than Gates Foundation?
I don’t care if it’s 80% or 0.8%. if you take money from billionaires to produce specific videos for them as propaganda, then that is shilling for them. there isn’t any way you can spin that to make it not true, but I’m sure you’ll do your very liberal best.
I’m afraid the world will be moving on while you wait for perfection.
I’m sure the world in general doesn’t give a shit about kurzgesagt in the first place, whatever their fans think.
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They accepted, and continue to accept a great amount of money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
It’s interesting how any false narrative starts with a granule of truth.
Kurzgesagt was indeed provided $570,000 in 2015. That money was paid out across the following four years.
They have not continued to accept any amount of money from the Gates foundation.
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Sorry, I didn’t think the word ‘continued’ would have needed underlining for anyone that could read what I wrote.
Using a piece of factual information to prop up false information within the same sentence is how false narratives take hold.
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I’m unsure we are talking about the same comment. The misinformation is the claim the Gates foundation is continuing to fund Kurzgesagt, when that clearly isn’t the case. This incorrect information is veiled by beginning the statement with the truth of the 2015 grant.
Insofar as the reputational damage Kurzgesagt has incurred, I’m not sure there’s much meat on that bone. Sure, you might believe they have fallen from grace or some such, but as I pointed out in another comment here, we can’t just connect everything under the sun and say ‘group A is bad because groups B through Y are all next to one another and with group Z doing all those injustices, group A is complicit in those crimes’.
To me, the question of whether Kurzgesagt is a Gates mouthpiece is pretty cut and dry. A few reasons for this, but the most glaring is simply that the money didn’t keep coming, and it wasn’t much money to begin with. I wouldn’t be going out of my way to talk up my employer to clients if my last bonus was a decade ago and didn’t even cover my rent for the month I got it.
These things are to be expected when you get bought by private equity,
Excuse me, what?
They are owned by private equity? It’s pretty common these days for the more popular YT channels. Veritasium, Astrum, Fireship, fern., and Hoog are some other examples. Basically, if it’s a popular YT channel, it’s either owned by PE, in negotiations to be acquired by PE, or pursued by a PE firm in the hopes that they can acquire it. Private equity is accelerating their acquisitions, actually, and they want to control everything that captures the attention of viewers.
Here’s a video that talks about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-rRXWhElI
No wonder veritasium has felt “off” for me for a good while as well. A few years ago I deliberately stopped watching that channel, seems there was a deeper reason behind my superficial reasons and gut feelings
The content is higher-quality, more like a TV production. But it’s still pretty solid. Good analogies and intuitive explanations.
He basically only makes “why everyone except me is wrong about X” content now, and it’s super smug and obnoxious.
They seem to use the “shotgun” future in Youtube for titles and Thumbnails. Having the a bunch of different titles and and thumbnails and eventually sticking with the combo that drives the most engagement.
Do you have actual evidence for Kurzgesagt being among PE-owned channels, or are you just extrapolating? Because the video you linked doesn’t mention them, and a quick search didn’t turn up anything about that.
I don’t see any evidence of that, as well.
extrapolating
Interesting way to say “making shit up”
Didn’t want to be too combative from the start lol
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if most of your money comes from billionaires and you admit to making propaganda videos for them, you’re owned by private equity. it doesn’t matter how much you or they argue about how that isn’t technically true because it’s not officially on paper.
Like it or not, words have meaning, and black and white thinking is comfortable, but doesn’t help anyone. There is still a massive difference between the gates foundation having a 0.5% stake in Kurzgesagt and them being “owned” by PE, and pretending otherwise just means you’re not actually interested in any kind of productive discussion.
When you sell your soul to the devil, it’s gone forever. And I never implied I was interested in “productive discussion”. I said what I said because I’ve seen what evidence there is and have made my own conclusions. I never said I was interested in debating.
There’s an incredible amount of money in those offers. Years ago Linus Tech Tips got an offer of 100m, so I get why people take the money.
I mean, I would probably sell the channel myself. That’s a lifechanging amount of money. I would buy some land deep in the backcountry, build a little walled village, and invite my family and friends to come live there. Grow our own food, set up some solar panels and wind turbines, buy up plenty of guns and ammo, and see if we couldn’t hunker down and live out the ever more likely downfall of the American economy in relative peace.
You had me up to “lots of guns and ammo”.
Sport shooting is fun
if you wanna just have boards with rusty nails and maybe a baseball bat for defense when trump takes the mask completely off and his raving followers form pogroms to round up people who aren’t loyal to him, then I will say something nice in your memory when the time comes.
You can’t even say anything nice now
What if I want only lots of guns and ammo, wiþout all þe oþer cult commune stuff? Is þat Ok?
A hundredth of that is a life-changing amount of money.
So basically you would turn yourself in a mini-me version of Zuckenberg, Musk and Bezos. Given this consideration I would reassess my life priorities if I were you
the priority would be the lives of my friends and family. that is a priority that will not change as long as I draw breath, no matter what anyone thinks.
Well, if the societal structure falls there won’t be anything left to provide for your friends and family and you’ll be left to eat each other in your compound as will the billionaires using their fortunes to build survival bunkers. If that’s the way you wanna go, with the leg of your mother as dinner, be my guest. If you, on the other hand, want to have a positive impact on the whole process helping stop this social decline there are much better ways to use your hypothetical money. It’s up to you to decide, greed over cooperation or the other way around?
What are Astrum, Fireship and Hoog?
Other YouTube channels? I said that.
Yes, and also I was able to extrapolate that much, but I was looking for some idea of what kind of content they provided.
That said, I can look them up; apologies for bothering you on the matter.
oh, sorry, I misunderstood your question. Veritasium and Astrum are science channels, Fireship covers programming. fern. and Hoog do what I guess you could call deep dive videos on all sorts of topics. everything from how the North Korean king travels, to how that giant hotel aquarium broke several years ago. it’s pretty random with them.
Thank you for the information.
Astrum makes space stuff videos? I dunno, been a while.
Fireship makes videos about programming. Has series about “(Programming language/Framework) explained in 100 seconds”, for example. I think people are complaining that the channel is slipping into AI dudebroery.
Hoog is a history/explainer type channel, I think.
Thanks for the information!
Anyone down voting this should be ashamed of themselves.
Like deeply and personally ashamed.
The type of shame that follows them for the rest their lives, because that’s how scummy you’d have to be in order downvote someone shining a light on how private equity is buying out major YouTube channels.
Something that I was entirely unaware of, and appreciate your comment regarding.
Bringing this general issue up in a thread about Kurzgesagt, without also providing evidence that Kurzgesagt specifically is actually part of that issue, is at best irrelevant and at worst misleading though
I get it. They like the channel, and don’t want to think that a channel they love could do something they don’t love. Or maybe some of them don’t see it as a bad thing in the first place.
Me, I’m the opposite. I want to know who owns the media I consume, because I want to know who might be influencing the things I see. It’s always better to have the whole truth, even if that truth hurts. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the channel still, it just means you’re better prepared to understand the context of anything that that channel might say. Even cold hard facts with empirical evidence can be propaganda, depending on how it’s presented.
Except you lied about who they are owned by.
Why make yourself out to be virtuous and caring about the truth when your entire premise is a lie?
I never made myself out to be virtuous, nor do I care about what you think of me. I’m an asshole, and that’s fine because I love me exactly how I am and don’t need random strangers on the internet for validation. and I certainly don’t care about what you think of them making propaganda videos. I wouldn’t even still be in this thread if you guys weren’t still throwing a tantrum about somebody calling out your precious favorite YouTube channel for their less-than-stellar quality and tendency to pander to billionaires.
I posted my opinion, you got butthurt over it. that’s as far as this conversation is ever going to go, because I don’t care about you enough to bother arguing it extensively. now why don’t you take your sci-fi antisemitic trope of a username and get out of my mentions.
You wrote all that shit and forgot that accusations like that need proof.
The video which made the accusations, not me, provided sources for all of the claims.
Did you even look?
Sorry, that was rhetorical, obviously you did not look.
I saw nothing about kurzgesagt
I didn’t single out any particular YouTube channel for individual scorn. My comment was in reference to that very well sourced video about private equity buying up / investing many YouTube channels, of which they provided sources for in the description of the video.
I just looked at the public company records and they are not owned by private equity. What are you talking about?
First off, no you didn’t.
Secondly, if you take money from billionaires to make propaganda videos for them, then you’re owned by them. You sell your soul to the devil, you can’t undo it later because you get called out for it.
Yeah because it’s super difficult to search public information.
I want an ad / DNS blocklist for AI slop. I want to not even be able to go to HiSToRiAn AsLeEp In ThE WoOdS channels on my networks and devices
You can have your Google search go before 2022. I do this sometimes
Google still does its psychotic summarys though.
Then other day I was trying to find out how to get just one AD account not to sync through to Azure without disabling it. And the AI came up with this complicated instruction set that didn’t work and was totally made up from nowhere. Now what on earth was the point in doing that?
At one point it told me I had to triple click on something. Because that’s totally a thing.
It’s so fun when it’s so specific about some detail with casual confidence that is based on absolutely nothing at all. I know ultimately it’s architecture is more akin to a predictive word generator, but it seems so much better.
Saw a clear demonstration and it is wild that the output is consistent, but at least in the model I saw being run, every word is generated without it having considered what the word after would be or what the general concept it is going for. For a human one has to already know the concept before he/she starts putting words to it, but at least the models I’ve seen explained with detail, it manages to assemble it word by word without knowing where it is trying to go in advance.
Yeah, after seeing it hallucinate on things I actually know, I’ve decided to never trust it.
You might try setting Google’s Web subsearch as your main search engine, or else put your searches through https://udm14.com/, which does the same thing.
[email protected] is a good one for stuff like this. That community loves their work.
world no thank you
Boo!
Some of their videos are pretty good, but taking funding from billionaires is never a good look.
I feel like the title doesn’t match the content.
The video gives an elaborate description on their evaluation of “AI” and it’s influence on the Internet at large. And then they conclude with “we’ll continue like before” directly contradicting the title.
Feels disingenuous. And ironic after they talked about their extensive investments into fact checking.
The video gives an elaborate description on their evaluation of “AI” and it’s influence on the Internet at large. And then they conclude with “we’ll continue like before” directly contradicting the title.
You missed the entire point of the video.
The claims are simple:
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in order to make this type of videos, they need to be able to reliable fact check
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data on the internet is increasingly polluted by AI slop, making it harder to distinguish fact from slop
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for now, they have no choice but to continue while being extra vigilant… but eventually, if things do not change, they will be unable to perform
It’s the exact same situation about climate change… we need to act now, most of us will suffer otherwise but for now we continue on living while trying to adjust where we can (recycling, reusing, less/no meat, etc) even if we know that will not be enough long term.
Also, presuming they are sincere and put in all that effort, they are competing with other sources that have no such discipline and they are able to flood the field and grab eyeballs faster than they could.
exactly, also explainedein the vid
Not the guy you’re answering to, but I kind of agree with him, the point is fuzzy and the title is clickbaity. With sucha title I expected they would present numbers and figures.
well, it may be a matter of context and tolerance here but I find the concept they are presenting is axiomatic and as such would not require any further explanation:
They use the internet to research their videos… the internet is getting more and more polluted with false narratives… ergo, it is becoming harder to research for their videos. Without good source, there are no videos.
If I tell you plants need water to exist but each season brings less and less rain year after year… would you say a title such as “drought is killing the plants” clickbaity?
I assumed they don’t do their research using random crap on “the internet”, but reliable experts, peer reviewed papers and such. No specific claims about topics, funding, time or anything. And again, no numbers, so hard to argue objectively.
I assumed they don’t do their research using random crap on “the internet”, but reliable experts, peer reviewed papers and such
Yes, that is what they claim. But I am sure you have seen how hard it is now to find something even if you know exactly what you are looking for. It’s not like there are 2 libraries online for anything you need, right? You start researching about topic A and read that Dr XYZ did a study on this so you look for that study… just to find out Dr XYZ does not and has never existed.
No specific claims about topics, funding, time or anything. And again, no numbers, so hard to argue objectively.
So you want a specific number as to how many bad sources they are now forcing to discard because they turned out to be AI slop?
To begin with. Time delta. Cost creep. Anything.
Those metrics aren’t any more trustworthy than their own subjective word anyway. If they wanted to say they took more time then they could delay at their whim anyway. If they said their production costs increased, then again, they could spend the money to fit the narrative. On those particular points objective evidence is so susceptible to being gamed that it isn’t really more valuable than their subjective reporting.
Numbers of subscribers/views could be a bit more informative, but then people inclined to disbelieve would claim it’s because of any number of other reasons not because of AI slop.
it’s not that type of channel… they never do more than a percentage or a rate.
their thing is to explain concepts in a way a young audience can digest them
Killing in this case sounds like the content is becoming harder and harder to create, which they lay out the subjective case for, but that wouldn’t be exactly something they could use figures to present, since it’s so subjective.
The one point they might have been able to show with numbers would be the emergence of AI slop ‘infotainment animations’ diluting the audience, but that wasn’t exactly the biggest point of the video and it might be a bit early to be able to demonstrate statistically credible evidence on that one.
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DeArrow shows the title as something like “why you can’t trust AI with facts”
I love DeArrow so much. Best addon I’ve ever donated to, very worth it
Do you think if we pool every AI in the world it will be able to figure out the difference between its and it’s? Seems unlikely.
Awww is it the first youtube video you watched?
Did you come into a comment section and expected not to see any comments?
Do you take everything as it is, without criticizing anything?
Do that if you want. No need to be so dismissive without actually making your point. Which I assume is that clickbait is “normal”.
The channel hat always been disingenuous. It’s not the first video they have where they develop a well written essay that has conclusions that make no sense with the information presented. It’s the theater of research without any of the substance. The editors just do whatever they want, under the expectations that the writing team will support their preconceived notion.
They’re an entertainment channel, not a science communication channel. They have said some awful, totally not fact supported stuff in the past.
They have said some awful, totally not fact supported stuff in the past.
Like?
Climate change whitewashing for corporations with awful conflicts of interest. Others have posted the links to the videos elsewhere in this comment section.
Wow look at all of the evidence you’ve provided. It’s going to take me all night to go through it.
If you going to make claims like that you’re going to need to provide even a shred of evidence
As far as science channels go, you’ve got SpaceTime for college students, Veritasium for high schoolers, and Kurzgesagt for newborn infants or maybe a smart dog. It’s probably at about the right level if you want to explain science to an Australian Shepherd.
c/iamverysmart
Veritasium was bought years ago. No editorial freedom. Never heard of SpaceTime. I have better sources for science than YouTube slop, thank you.
Given the fact that you don’t appear to know how to cite your sources I’m not convinced that you in fact do have better sources for science.
Yea the channel is known for being biased and just weird in general
It isn’t known for those things at all.
Yea, nah, it absolutely is. They often sneak in bad information and poorly interpreted data to fearmonger (see their nuclear power “educational” videos where they instill fear) and other such things. They’re just like some other science channels. Like veritasium, which shilled out for Waymo. Just because the animations are very very nice doesn’t mean you shouldn’t confirm the information they present, and quite often it’s wrong on purpose to butter up the right people. If you don’t believe me, that’s okay. They’re not dangerous like pseudoscience channels. Most things they present are good. I just hate that they mix in BS.
You’re using a lot of weasel words and zero sources for someone arguing we should all fact check things.
I’m not even saying your wrong, but your going to have to do a lot more than that to convince me that “they’re known for” everything you just said, because that sounds like you have a very specific beef with them that overshadows everything else they’ve ever done (in your estimation) and your projecting that as a universal truth, when really it’s not.
I respect your opinion, but there are certainly far more worse channels than there are better ones, and they’re known for being one of the better ones.
edit: If this is what you’re trying to say, I agree with you: https://lemy.lol/comment/21580850
That + entertainment over information quality. I’m not here to convince anybody, my goal was to make y’all think twice about just blindly trusting theor videos. They’re the Linus Tech Tips of the science channel world.
Right so you say everyone should source all their work but then claim very specific things about the channel and then refuse to provide sources.
Interesting.
But I guess as long as you’re not here to try and convince anyone that what you’re saying is true it’s okay for you to just say anything regardless of validity. That’s very political of you, well done.
I literally never said everyone should source all their work. You’re reading between the lines. What I said is that SOME science channels sneak in misinformation and shilling in their videos which are otherwise educational and most of the time very accurate.
I watched this with my son last night. Quite enjoyed it. I find the cadences of the narrator’s voice oddly soothing, although ironically it sounds very like an AI voice.
I’ve been watching that channel for years it’s very high quality.
I mean there’s been some controversy surrounding a number of their videos. Some were under fire for poor research or demonstrating a singular, not widely-held view on certain topics. And I think for one video they were accused of plagiarism iirc. This was when it was still somewhat early days for the channel, haven’t followed them since so not sure what the state is now.
everything has controversy. I really do not care
In the video you’re literally commenting on they explain how they fact check their videos and how they work with professionals in the field at matter.
You can always complain that something wasn’t as good as you personally wanted it to be but that may very well be bias. The people making the accusations may have a bias. All we can do is take the totality of their output and cast judgement on that.
The point was that they haven’t always held themselves up to those standards and have sometimes only used professionals espousing a single viewpoint (where multiple exist).
I should mention this isn’t bias, iirc the channel did release a video apologizing for some of the issues (though not all), so it wasn’t even up to their own standards by their own admission.
There’s a wikipedia entry listing some of the controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurzgesagt#%3A~%3Atext=While+some+commentators+have+praised%2Cand+use+of+emotive+language.
Looking things up now, I see that the plagiarism case was slightly different: they had published a video on addiction, which was fairly explosive in its claims. Turns out it was citing basically just one fringe researcher who was also accused of plagiarism. The claims did not seem to hold up to scrutiny.
When another channel doing a series on how pop-sci influencers can sometimes spread misinformed ideas asked some questions to Kurzgesagt, they were immediately a bit apprehensive but agreed to do some interview questions, though with the caveat that they were busy with other things and needed a few weeks before it could take place. Then before the interview took place they suddenly put out their own apology video and took the addiction video down. At no point was it mentioned that another channel prompted this action, it was presented as some kind of inward reflection that they had come to themselves.
What do you think AI voices were trained off of?
probably using an AI voice themselves.
I have noticed that I don’t click on their videos as fast. Used to be that as soon as you see a video in the feed it was an instant click.
I think the topics they make videos on these days feel more gimicy and click baity so I kinda avoid them
100%. The recent videos all seem like they’re ragebait (‘alcohol is awesome’ springs to mind).
They could be good, I haven’t watched them. if they’re targeting people who respond to that tone then it’s not for me.
It’s a shame. I liked the earlier videos on ant colonies and strange matter and stars and stuff.
Yeah, me too. This was instant click though.
And instant ad for their merch.
I get the frustration, but it does actually cost money to make content, especially high effort content like this.
Add on top of that the fact that the people involved need to be able to eat, have a home, provide for their families, have a life.
People would complain if they were sponsored by some shitty VPN provider or the like, and also complain about them trying to sell merch. I certainly wouldn’t work for free, so I don’t see why they should have to.
It’s not really that hard to do a couple of key presses to skip ahead, either. It’s what I do.
Honestly, I don’t care. They chose to “make content”. If they aren’t making enough, get a real job.
It’s definitely not only that.
I and, from what I’ve seen discussed here and elsewhere online, many other people have stopped watching the channel because of many valid reasons completely unrelated to AI. I haven’t watched a single one of their videos for years, something changed in their content and I just lost interest. Then there have been several controversial events throughout the years, both objective bad stuff and subjective things that made many loose interest and faith in their integrity. They definitely became one of the many channels that lost it’s way because of how big it got. The animations became too “perfect” in a weird way, they lost their personality and they also got scared of having real opinions so they started doing this “all sides” shit and that’s when I tapped out. I’ve tried to watch new videos from them about once every 6 months or so, but I can’t even make it past a minute without completely loosing interest.You didn’t even watch this video.
I mean, I didn’t watch this video because I lost interest when the channel started getting really dark around 2020. I just needed a laugh during the pandemic. I didn’t need 4 videos in a row about the end of the world, then a few about the end of the universe, followed by a future civil war. It was too much.
Personally, I find videos about the end of the universe very humbling and comforting.
In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.
So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.
It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?
I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.
This is not an airport, you don’t have to announce your departure
Completely agree, their channel has changed a lot and seems to be producing videos on a conveyor belt now, while before they used to do one video or maximum two a month. Now it seems they produce a video a week, and interesting topics are more hard to come by.
When they said that they’re “almost 70 full time people and a lot of freelancers on top” I almost did a spit take. I know there are big channels and operations on YT, but this seems such an unreasonable amount of employees for this type of channel and audience. No wonder it feels oversaturated and overdone, they probably feel the need to put more and more videos to keep their huge team and expences afloat.
Just find a sustainable pace and team size, don’t go the corporate way of growth over all.
I think you might be referenced in this video 😉
Honestly, it isn’t the AI so much as it is the suspension that rules that apply to us should also apply to AI. They are barely legal companies getting away with murder due to the residual power of a corrupt empire in decline.
Much the same as blockchain - it could have been exciting and fun, but it was immediately put to work to exploit people, and in the end that’s what the tools effectively were.
I don’t think blockchain has any legitimate uses. All of the proposed uses for blockchain are all tech bro nonsense.
I think they were talking about having a decentralised property permits. As if that’s something that would be even remotely useful.
You’d be surprised how valuable these technologies can be when they’re not only being developed to create new financialized services to overcharge people for. Manufacturing and shipping has huge capital and logistic buffers created by information gaps, production shortfalls, fraud, etcetera, and cryptographic ledgers are excellent for ensuring accurate production and inventory information is relayed to clients in realtime. What’s more, it has the potential to mediate international transactions without relying on Swift or global banking institutions that are an extension of US authority.
Notice how nothing I said was about fucking NFTs. The western financial system completely lost the plot doing super cocaine and became convinced they could just ask the rest of the world to stay slaves forever. They don’t even care about its potential! They want TrumpCoin.
Yeah, and if it weren’t for the techbro nonsense, it would be tossed onto the pile of mathematical curios that don’t have nontrivial uses.
The thing is - we often do find uses for those curiosities years later.
In the mean time, I wouldn’t mind if a decentralized video game came along where game assets were decentralized, distributed by bittorrent, and player assets were decentralized and tracked by blockchain.
I lost interest in the channel due to their overly optimistic hopium, e.g. “We WILL solve climate change.”
They don’t say that, though?
They say things like “with effort, we can solve climate change, or minimise its effects.”
Which is very different. And personally, I hate over the top doomerism where everyone says everything is fucked beyond repair all the time.
I’m pretty sure they do say that, almost exactly.
“with effort, we can solve climate change, or minimise its effects.”
The issue is not the claim that with effort we maybe can minimise the effects, it’s the techno-utopia angle. We will solve this by changing nothing about the underlying economic system driving climate change, but Bill Gates and other smart billionaires will make some fantastic technology that will save us!
There’s nothing helpful about giving up though is there.
And we could stop climate change, it’s entirely possible, presumably people don’t want to die so they will take action but they probably not going to start to act until climate change becomes more apparent, that’s depressing but that’s human nature. Humans have a long history of making radical changes at the last minute, e.g the cold war.
We like to go right up to the cliff edge but we tend not to take the final step.
After all even China is cleaning up its act and they’re the least likely to be cooperative so if even they’re doing something about it there’s hope.
capitalism will solve climate change
Tangential, but thats what disgusted me about the Osaka world expo. The theme was sustainability so you had fossil fuel companies presenting wildly impractical “solutions” and art projects. The message was “things are under control, continue sleepwalking into oblivion”
Have you heard of the experiment with swimming rats and how much longer they swam when given hope? We need hope to survive.
Though they don’t say we will solve it, but that we can solve it if we start now.
We will not solve it, it’s way too late for that. Still, every 0.01°C additional warming counts. People not born yet will suffer more from everything we don’t do now. So, rolling on our backs and giving up is not helping at all. Going vegan is a easy first step to make a difference. Start blowing up pipelines after that. :)
going vegan has not made any difference
Good news, this video is not very optimistic
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Kurzgesagt is annoyingly techno-solutionist but now that they are a big target of AI slop (their artistic style being heavily copied), they complain. That’s good I guess.
If you actually watch the video that’s not what they’re talking about. They are talking about how it’s difficult to fact check information in a world of AI misinformation.
I always find it’s easier to know what a video is about if I actually watched the video. It’s just this little life hack I’ve come up with.
Watch the video? Duh. Thanks I watched it, and I know they don’t talk about how AI steals their art style (even though it’s really happening). I just pointed out the irony. The video also says they are usually enthusiastic about new tech but not this time.
I know this channel well enough to have seen countless videos praising fake tech like carbon capture and that’s why I have a problem with them. Am I allowed to have an opinion?
You are allowed to have an opinion but when it’s a stupid opinion expect to be ridiculed for it.
Carbon capture is an actual technology it’s real and it works. There’s not a lot of it about yet but there’s also not a lot of fusion reactors yet but they’re also real technology.
I don’t think they are techno-solutionists but that sometimes is the vibe they give off.
I just think there’s some directions they won’t go thanks to the threat of capital.
Techno-solutionist lol. The power of labels eh?
What is the problem with techno-solutionism? Is it just that under capitalism techno-solutionism often results in corruption? Is the development of lemmy not techno-solutionism (to the enshittification of reddit)?
I’m curious why you have a different title than the video?
Al Slop ls Destroying The Internet
Large YouTube channels usually try different titles and thumbnails during the first few hours after upload, so the title OP posted was probably accurate at the time of posting.
Got it, thank you.
Either Kurzgesagt changed the title, or it’s A/B testing with multiple titles. When I watched the video yesterday, it had the same title as OP used
They changed it.
You can still edit and change the title!
Have they considered that they’re just not a great channel?
Have you actually watched any of their videos? That’s obviously not true
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